Focus on InCity: residential complex in Bucharest

Nowadays, all the EU countries, from North to South, from East to West, are dealing with the urgency of approving and implementing new measures to improve the energy efficiency of public and private buildings. The new European regulations such as the energy package “Clean Energy for all Europeans“, the Integrated National Energy and Climate Plans and the Green New Deal force countries to put limits, take action and meet the energy-efficiency goals.

If on the one hand, national governments are dealing with energy consumption of public buildings, on the other hand, the private households are a crucial part of the national energy use. Making users more conscious about their energy consumption can be key to meet the goal. By raising the awareness of the individual approach towards energy consumption and by actively changing their behaviour in this regard, significant energy reductions can be achieved. This is what eTEACHER and the Romanian energy company ICPE are doing in InCity, a residential complex located in Bucharest, Romania. Here, some apartments have been equipped with tools to monitor the energy consumption at the building/apartment level and to the quality of the indoor and outdoor conditions. The direct beneficiaries of the eTEACHER intervention are the residents of these buildings as well as their administrators that can observe in real-time the energy and environment parameters values and take actions accordingly.

Since the beginning, the active involvement at the basis of the eTEACHER method raised both the curiosity and the interest of a large part of the InCity occupants. The live presentations held on-site contribute to raising the awareness of the occupants’ attitude regarding energy consumption, and have positive impacts on the family budget and the environment at large. The devices installed indicate in real-time, (on mobile phones or computers) the energy consumption for different household consumers and environmental parameters such as temperature, relative humidity, CO2 level, lighting level in the apartment. Therefore, participants are empowered directly to observe the impact of their actions, and consequently to consciously choose/decide their actions.

In addition to this, the IT application developed by eTEACHER, shows the history of the energy consumption of the apartment, environmental parameters, the trends and it sends advice to encourage actions for optimizing energy consumption. Also, users can provide feedback and participate in an online energy-efficiency challenge by interacting with other participants. All these elements corroborated contribute successfully to characterize the buildings/apartments/occupants behaviour and to achieve the objectives proposed within the eTEACHER project.

21 Apr 2020

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